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At a Time when our understanding of human experience has grown increasingly complex, and the awareness of cultural diversity is imperative to a clinician's unraveling this complexity, Jack Drescher presents us with an in-depth, readily accessible treatise on the unique conflicts that confront and often confuse gay men and their therapists.
More than forty years after Evelyn Hooker (1957) demonstrated that there are no differences between “homosexual” and “heterosexual” men, and almost thirty years since the APA removed homosexuality from the DSM, there still are psychoanalytic institutes in the world where homosexuality is pathologized. In fact, “for the third time, the International Psychoanalytical Association has…turned down a motion against discrimination based on sexual orientation” (Ubaldi, 2001). Drescher, however, informs us that things are changing. Gay and lesbian candidates are being accepted to psychoanalytic institutes where once they were shunned. Courageous people like Richard Isay (1989), Bert Schaffner (1996), and Drescher himself (1997) have opened the way for a paradigmatic shift in our thinking about normal gay development. They have demonstrated the usefulness of psychoanalytic inquiry (Sullivan, 1954) for the understanding of gay men and amelioration of suffering inherent in being born into a culture that appraises one as defective, abnormal, or sinful. Drescher has written a book in which he integrates two old adversaries: psychoanalytic theory and gay rights.
Drescher invites his readers to approach his book as if they were gay men themselves. He cautions us not to assume that we understand what it means or feels like to be gay, or that being gay means only one thing. Early in the book he makes the distinction between “homosexuality”—one aspect of a man's identity—and being gay. As analysts, we need always to be focused on the individual who comes to us presenting problems in living (Sullivan, 1953). Yet, being gay brings with it a unique host